


Fight of the Thrillmaster

by Warringer (The_Fenspace_Collective)



Series: Candle In The Dark: A Peculiar Saga of the Sea of Time [11]
Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Fenspace
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1593659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Fenspace_Collective/pseuds/Warringer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The Great Pirate Invasion Suite:</i> Only a lunatic - or a Kerbal - would think of taking a salvage ship up against a fully armed and operational dropship...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fight of the Thrillmaster

Naedial Warringer stood in front of the holographic plot table that was a recent addition to the command bridge of the _Thrillmaster_. Pulling together the majority of Whistler’s fleet still in the Sol system and trying to organize things had made it necessary to add something like this. Operation Great Justice just had to politely request their help with the Procyon fleet hadn’t they?

Now she had only about half of her fleet of debris collectors and maintenance and repair ships and had to make sure to keep them out of any fighting that might happen as best as she could.

“Not sure if this is a good idea,” Terris O'Conner, former ESA astronaut, fifth original crewman of the _Toy Box_ and now nominal captain of the _Thrillmaster_ , if Jeb wasn't playing around. “The fight is going to come here pretty soon.”

Naedial eyed him for a moment.

“If we wait further out we don't have the chance to help as well as we can if we start out here. We've been over it again and again. Besides, what is the worst that could happen?”

Terris glared at her as the general emergence alert for cislunar space sounded over the PA system.

“You just had to say that, didn't you?”

“Feel free to sue me when this is over...”

A pair of white spots appeared on the plot table, indicating that there had been KF events in the Sol-Terra and Terra-Luna L1 points. And the _Thrillmaster_ was rather close to the Sol-Terra L1.

Interwave and radio traffic peaked as everyone gave commands to their ships and the plot display awoke to life as ships began to move mainly towards the Sol-Terra L1, leaving only a small number of ships to take care of the Jumpship that had appeared in the Terra-Luna L1.

“Look what we have there,” Jeb piped up.” The _Rogue Elephant_ is back. And they brought a few friends.”

After glancing at the plot and noting that the indicated ship has appeared slightly away from the others, Naedial looked around and at Terris. She just had had an idea...

“Are you pondering what I am pondering?” she wondered.

“I don’t know, Nae. Where do we get a gimp and a horse?”

Terris and Naedial blinked, before looking at Arno Nym. The mouse-beaver had sneaked up to them and was now looking at them with his very effective puppy dog eye look.

Naedial looked back at Terris, who rolled his eyes.

“I’m thinking that Hale would owe everyone at Whistler a beer if we can pull that off,” Terris answered her previous question with a grin, making her chuckle. “And that is a large number of beers.”

Arno cracked up.

“We’ll ruin the poor man.”

“I think we can,” Naedial notes. “We have not one but two large scale salvage craft don’t we? And an _Invader_ may be larger than us, but we are better armed.”

Then she moves to give orders to the other ships.

~***~

Naedial had to retract her comment of the _Elephant_ being less well armed. Jeb had checked the ‘wave after she made her claim, telling them that the ship was armed with a PPC and a Large Laser. Not to mention that a _Leopard_ Dropper had chosen to remain behind, most likely after hearing stories about fast ships in Fenspace and wanting to take one of them.

And like most of the ships in cislunar space were making best way to get to the Sol-Terra L1, the _Thrillmaster_ was one to follow quickly, avoiding most of the droppers speeding towards Earth. At least most of them as a _Leopard_ was making his way to them. Apparently they were looking like such a juicy target.

“There goes one of our forward bulkheads,” Jeb noted as the ship suddenly shook under the hit from a PPC blast. “But they don’t seem to be able to track us that well.”

Naedial quickly scolded herself for having thoughts that tempted Murphy. Again.

It looked like their range is longer than anyone expected. And the pair of gauss guns or the point defense turrets were not very likely to be able to take on the magical armor of a BT dropship.

“Scheisse...”

There was something of a flurry of activity as the pilot of Beta shift threw the _Thrillmaster_ into evasive maneuvers, followed by the hum of activating shields. Not that they were going to get the _Thrillmaster_ that much time, making them too much of a tempting target with their bright sparkling shield, that left 25 percent of the weapon discharges through anyway.

“We needed a plan,” Arno noted dryly. “Something that involved a large amount of explosives...”

Terry and Naedial turned our heads at the same time to each other.

“Jeb,” they said unison with large grins on their faces.

“Yes?” their green skinned Thrillmaster asked and blinked. He did not see them like this very often.

To understand that, people needed to know that both were avid Spacebattlers, as well as followers of the Mythbusters. And while ramming them ‘til they gave up’ was out of the question, they could do with a big boom.

“About your light gas gun, Jeb...”

The ship shook as they were hit again, this time taking out one of the port grapplers.

“Oh, I see,” Jeb said and grinned one of his really mad grins. Like the ones he got when the _Thrillmaster_ fired her Fusor Engines. ”One toasty _Leopard_ coming right up.”

Jeb, in a fit of obsession with launching his rockets out of a large gun, had managed to build a large bore, one meter to be exact, light gas gun and strapped it to the bow of the _Thrillmaster_. And all that without anyone noticing. It had come to light only a few days earlier, but in the flurry of activity leading up to the pirate attack had been largely ignored. Until now.

He took the controls over the ship from the poor pilot and made the ship bear right down at the _Leopard_ in an intercept course for at least thirty seconds, allowing the dropper to get another few hits in, but nothing that couldn’t be repaired with a large amount of duct tape.

“Firing.”

The firing of the light gas gun was like the ship had been hit by an over sized sledgehammer, but the result was spectacular.

A one meter booster, one of those that seemed to attach themselves to any ship repaired on the _Thrillmaster_ , hit the _Leopard_ amidships, before exploding on a display that pleased any closet pyromaniac on the ship and was later watched by at least a million people after the footage was put up on YouTube.

It had to be at least two tons of really high explosives that exploded in the side of the dropper, after the little command module with the Kerbal strapped into it had managed to hit a weak point in one of the Mech hangars.

From what later analysis of the footage showed, there was a large amount of secondary explosions, their spectroscopic lines consistent with LRMs. They had hit one of the Leopards ammo dumps, which pretty much took the dropper out of action.

So a lucky shot.

“Hmmm...” Jeb made after the crew had finished cheering at this very nice display. “Looks like we lost the Light Gas Gun.”

“What?” was the question that came from just about everyone.

“Looks like it ripped out of its holding brackets,” Jeb commented further.” Next time I’m not using duct tape.”

“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” came Arno’s comment and he made a gripping motion to go with the quote.” Do not doubt the power of the sticky side!”

~***~

The _Thrillmaster_ moved closer and closer towards the _Elephant_ , while the Jumpship took potshots at the large, but still smaller ship with its two weapons. The captain knew that Fen armor was weak compared to BT armor, but he had not taken the shield into account. Not that it did that much good for the _Thrillmaster_.

That those weapons needed to be taken out was clear for everyone, but the armor the Jumpship still made it hard if not impossible to use the _Thrillmaster’_ stwin coilguns.

“Screw this,” Jeb cursed in between the bridge crew discussing a way to take out the guns. ”They are scratching my finish!”

It was not as if he had taken that much care of his paintjob, so that effectively halted any discussion. Then two screens changed to show all six of the _Thrillmaster’_ sorbital sleds launching from the hangar deck, each one filled to the brim with Kerbals in bright orange space suits.

“What the hell?” Naedial shouted as she stared at one of the screens and noted how the _Thrillmaster_ was slowing down and now shot back at the Jumper with its weapons. “Jeb, what are you doing.”

“Taking that ship!”

While the discussion between Naedial and Jeb descended into something of a shouting match, the six orbital sleds made their way towards the _Rogue Elephant_ without many problems. Well, aside from a laser beam hitting one sled and making Kerbals spill out from it to float helplessly in space, something they were really good at.

But aside from that all six sleds made their way to the Invader to take its name back to them. They stayed out of the weapons firing arcs as best as they could, through a single sled was destroyed by a PPC blast with most of the Kerbals surviving. Then they found the airlocks.

Using a skeleton key on each airlock they quickly gained access to the ship and about sixty Kerbals piled into a trio of airlocks that could barely contain them all. The air locks cycled and while there were a number of pirates and crew members with weapons standing by in front of the airlocks, they were not prepared for the orange and green horde spilling out of the airlocks.

While they managed to get off a shot or two, they were quickly knocked out or held by the flood of Kerbals before they made their way towards the bridge, all the while screaming about how Jeb made their life hell and how they wanted to take this ship as their new home.

“They stopped firing,” Terris yelled into the loud argument between captain and AI of the _Thrillmaster_ , making both stop, with Jeb grinning widely.

“See? I told you so.”

Naedial in turn grumbled at the AI, before her eyes moved towards Arno, who tried his best not to be visible. Especially since he was the reason why the ship even had Jeb as its AI.

About five minutes later the _Thrillmaster’_ s waldos had attached themselves to the Jumpship and a flexible docking tube extended to one of the airlocks.

Naedial and Terris were the first ones to enter the ship, and the first they saw where crewmen and pirates trussed up with duct tape like they were mummies, with Kerbals keeping an eye one them.

“Can we keep this ship?” one of the Kerbals, his name tag read ‘George’. “We don’t want to go back to Jeb... He’ll just strap us to one of his rockets...”

Naedial and Terris looked at each other again.

“Can we even keep this ship? Or do we have to give it to the Convention?”


End file.
